Building help.ubuntu.com

[Shaun McCance]

On Mon, 2016-09-26 at 13:34 -0700, Doug Smythies wrote:
> On 2016.09.26 11:27 Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Hi all,
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Currently, if I recall things correctly, help.ubuntu.com is built
> > with
> > a set of scripts that call yelp-build with the -x option for custom
> > styling. Rather than have every project roll its own orchestration
> > scripts, I've been working on a tool called Pintail to manage
> > entire
> > documentation sites:
> > 
> > https://github.com/projectmallard/pintail
> In terms of a time-line, could I suggest that we leave the already in
> progress 16.10 alone. Then we could do some trial work or whatever
> as part of the 17.04 cycle, starting early in an attempt to avoid
> deadline stress.

Absolutely. Changing out tools on 16.10 right would be madness.

> In the meantime, would it make sense for you to do a build of
> help.ubuntu.com so as to understand what we do today? It would be
> pretty simple, as we are just replacing the 16.10 desktop help docs
> during remaining updates this cycle. All the other stuff stays the
> same.

Can somebody remind me where the current build scripts and stuff are?
I'll take a crack at a basic setup in the next couple weeks.

> Keep in mind that we (the current doc committers) are more custodians
> of workflows that were created before our time than we are experts
> on the deep details. In particular, I tend to get lost whenever I
> have to dig deep into yelp while investigating some issue.

Sure. A lot of your tools came from GNOME, and you should always feel
free to reach out to GNOME for help. But your build scripts are kind of
a custom job. Hopefully having those replaced by a maintained upstream
project will make your lives easier. Doc writers shouldn't have to
spend their time doing ops work.

--
Shaun